science doesn't really know why you dream we humans know more about solar systems light years away than we do about our nightly hallucinate bedtime stories sure we know that you mostly dream during rapid eye movement or REM sleep and we know that REM sleep has a lot to do with forming memories but why dream in all of this what is the connection between forming memories and hyperrealistic hallucinations of picnicking with Tom Heston there's not really any good answers science doesn't really know but there are theories and every Theory usually falls under one of two umbrellas
one side claiming that dreams have a primary function and the other side saying that dreams are an epiphenomenon or for those who only know regular person words collateral damage of other primary functions meaning it's pretty much just an Easter egg of the brain the primary function people look at it like this see we can observe by hooking people up with wires that during REM sleep you are most often experiencing negative emotion particularly anxiety so these scientists reason that dreams are then to prepare us for threats so we will be able to act in the midst
of of anxiety in the real world claiming that dreams are an evolutionary trait that early humans that dreamed anxieties were more prepared to face actual events because they have felt the anxieties under maybe different circumstances in in their dreams so the scarier dreams you had the more prepared you were the epiphenomenon people look at it from a different standpoint they have the idea that during REM sleep the unconscious part of our brain is sorting memories throwing out the useless information and really dialing in what's important the theory goes that the electrical impulse is created whilst
this is going on is detected by our conscious brain and our cortex just kind of gets confused with all this noise and throws together a story to make sense of it creating a dream also because it's your cortex it will usually incorporate things that you think about often hence why sometimes you'll dream of being fed grapes by Tom Heston this category of thinking says that dreams don't serve any purpose and instead they're just a random byproduct the problem I have with that standpoint is that our bodies have seemingly gone Great Lengths to ensure we're able
to dream for example during REM sleep your brain inhibits motor neurons in the spinal cord essentially vegetabl vising you while you sleep so you don't act out your dreams it's like your brain is going out of its way to dream there are also cases where dreams themselves have seemingly helped people process information going contrary to the idea that they are purposeless for example in 1845 an inventor named Elias hoe had been obsessing over an idea of a machine with a needle that would go through the cloth for you but he had no idea how it
would work one night he had a strange dream where he was about to be cooked by cannibals Unfortunately they didn't have Tom hlon back then the cannibals were dancing around him with Spears about to throw him in fire but he noticed something strange about their Spears each one had a small hole near the tip when he woke up he couldn't get the image of the strange Spears up and down motion out of his mind he then realized that was the key to making his machine work mov the hole from the back of the needle like
how it's done by hand to the point of the needle like the spears so thanks to a dream that he realized the technological possibility of this sewing machine Carl Young believed that dreams had a very significant meaning and seems to have a middle ground of the two categories of thinking he stated that dreams are messages sent up from the unconscious in his words the dream is a spontaneous self- patril and symbolic form of the actual situation in unconscious the dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious that's quite interesting to me a little too many
big words for my taste but interesting nonetheless I think that way of thinking appeals to me because for most of my life life I've had lucid dreams allow me to give you an example of a lucid dream one night I had a dream where I was locked sitting in my room but my room was empty no furniture I saw a wind up toy lizard that began winding itself once it was done winding it moved like a real life lizard immediately after that I thought to myself yeah this is a dream so I got up decided
my door wasn't locked anymore went to my driveway where a full dining room set from Ikea was set up sat down and began having a philosophical discussion with Mr Beast now according to the epip phenomenon people your conscious formulates dreams while your subconscious is hard at work to me this dismantles the epiphenomenon way of thinking and affirms Young's beliefs because when I ask my dream people troubling questions I always get answers from a seemingly New Perspective I don't actively or consciously formulate a response to that question so by definition isn't that subconscious but maybe we're
just thinking about this wrong the epiphenomenon people classify the subconscious is basically anything that's not your cortex like your hippocampus and amydala but neither the hippocampus or amydala could formulate a thought like what I experienced in a lucid dream in fact only one part of your brain can the left hemisphere or the right hemisphere if you're part of the outcast minority that is left-handers either way your brain is split in half if I were to ask you to solve 345 * 2 and explain your answer that would almost entirely involve your left hemisphere but if
I were to ask you to imagine a sunset rowboat ride in the middle of the ocean laying in the lap of Tom Heston whilst watching the Minions movie that's your right hemisphere while we see activity in both sides of the brain during Rim sleep there's one specific part that lights up the right temporal l or more inclusively for you left-hand weirdos the non-dominant temporal L this part of the core text is involved in learning and remembering non-verbal information like Visos spatial material music and the cinematography of that one Tom Heston movie okay so you are
processing information during REM sleep then that seems clear but my observations during lucid dreaming seems to contradict the idea that dreams themselves are just collateral maybe it has something to do with the Corpus kosum which connects the two hemispheres but then Mr Beast wouldn't be able to articulate himself as you can see it gets messy science kind of breaks nothing makes sense so let's turn away from science to a philosophical way of thinking to give us the illusion of an answer maybe dreams point out a path unknown to the waking conscious giving much needed heatings
of what's to come in the form of Tom [Music] Heston oh
